Title of Dissertation: national renewable energy policy

Renewables 
Capacity Statistics 2016. 
Masdar City: IRENA, 2016. 
http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/IRENA_RE_Capacity_Statistics
_2016.pdf. 
2
Liebreich, Michael, “Global Trends in Clean Energy Investment”, Bloomberg EMEA 
Summit, London, October 12, 2015.
3
Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21
st
Century, 
Renewables 2015: Global 
Status Report
. Paris: REN21 Secretariat. 2015. http://www.ren21.net/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/REN12-GSR2015_Onlinebook_low1.pdf. 

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the goal to increase the share of renewable energy in national energy mix, these new 
policies do not serve this goal. Rather, the purpose of these policies is to protect domestic 
renewable energy industry. The U.S. and the EU adopted policy measures to address 
solar panels imported from China since these imported panels injured domestic industry. 
Domestic content requirement, which requires renewable energy developers to use 
domestic products, has been adopted by a few countries including Canada and India. 
Table 1.
Selected new types of renewable energy policies. 
Country 
Policy 
Timing of 
implementation 
Anti-dumping 
U.S. 
Tariff on Chinese solar panels 
October, 2012 
EU 
Minimum price for solar panels
from China 
Limit the total capacity of imports from 
China 
August, 2013 
Domestic 
content 
requirement 
Canada 
Guaranteed, long-term pricing for 
renewable energy from facility that 
contain domestic content 
September, 
2009 
India 
Requirements for solar power 
developers to purchase domestic 
products to enter into power purchase 
agreement 
January 2010 
Italy 
Provision of incentive if contents are 
from within the EU 
March, 2011 
The rise of these policies has caused international trade disputes. Nine dispute 
cases have been submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) related to renewable 
energy policies as of October 10, 2016 (Table 2). Among them, five cases are related to 
domestic content requirement; the complaint countries argued that domestic content 
requirement of respondent countries were less favorable to imported goods, which was 
the violation of the WTO rules. Canada had to revise its policy since the WTO concluded 
that its domestic content requirement violated the WTO rules. China claimed the U.S. 

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countervailing and anti-dumping measures on Chinese solar panels. As the U.S. 
government found that Chinese solar panels were dumped by using huge governmental 
supports, the U.S. imposed tariff on them. China reacted to it by arguing that there was no 
sufficient evidence of unfair subsidization. On January 16, 2015, the WTO upheld some 
contentions of the U.S. as well as those of China.